atmosphere of Montgomery Place, with all its historic associations,
together with the close companionship of his gifted wife, was an
inspiration. He accumulated there a library which, at the time of his
death, was considered one of the most valuable private collections
in America. He bequeathed it to his wife with the request that she
make such disposition of it as best pleased her. Shortly before her
death she arranged for its transfer to the Boston Library, where it is
preserved, as she knew her husband desired his life work should be, in
its entirety, and known as the Barton collection.
In 1870 she went to France to superintend there the publication of
a new edition of her father's work on Penal Laws, which appeared
simultaneously with an English edition. In France a number of her
father's friends were still living, among them Mr. Charles Lucas, of
the French Institute, who wrote the Preface to the edition brought out
in that country.
Having survived her parents and husband, Mrs. Barton died suddenly at
Montgomery Place on the 23d of May, 1873.
The last two winters of her life were spent in Washington, where, at a
time when American society was singularly rapid, she shone as the last
ray from the glory of an age that was gone, in her whole manner and
bearing the unmistakable gentlewoman.
Going one day to her former home, the Decatur House, she requested,
without giving her name, that she might be permitted to see the
drawing-room. General Beale, who then occupied the house, of which
his widow still retains possession, in courteous compliance with her
request, led the way thither. As she entered the familiar apartment,
memory, conjuring up the forms that were no more, shut out the actual
presence of her host. At length regaining her self-possession, she
said, "A strange desire has of late possessed me to see again this
house in which I spent such happy days. Just where I am standing now I
stood thirty-nine years ago and was married." "You then were Miss Cora
Livingston," said the general, entering into her mood and reverting
instinctively to the days when her scintillating wit had made the name
famous, though in the sorrow-laden woman there was no trace of the
glorious girl.
EMILY MARSHALL
(MRS. WILLIAM FOSTER OTIS)
Boston claims as her own the greatest American man of the nineteenth
century, and even with more justice, the most beautiful woman born in
America within the same period. "Emily Marshall as completely filled
the ideal of the lovely and feminine, as did Webster the ideal of the
intellectual and the masculine," Quincy, a native of the same State,
has written of her, adding that though superlatives were intended only
for the use of the very young, not even the cooling influences of half
a century enabled him to avoid them in speaking of her.
He never forgot the first time he saw her walking on Dover Street
Bridge, Boston's fashionable promenade in those days. "Centuries are
likely to come and go," he continued, "before society will again gaze
spellbound upon a woman so richly endowed with beauty as was Miss Emily
Marshall. She stood before us, a reversion to that faultless type of
structure which artists have imagined in the past, and to that ideal
loveliness of feminine disposition which poets have placed in the
mythical golden age."
Daniel Webster upon one occasion, during his residence in Boston,
entered the old Federal Street Theatre, and was hailed with cheers.
A few minutes later Emily Marshall appeared in her box, when the
entire audience rose as one man and offered her the same homage it had
bestowed upon Webster. To us who look back upon her, through nearly
three-quarters of a century, she stands forth in such exquisite relief
from her environment that we are conscious of it only where the light
of her beguiling presence touches it.
She was the daughter of Josiah Marshall, a Boston merchant in the
China trade, a man of sagacity and enterprise in business affairs, and
possessed of those traits that made him a most lovable father, wisdom,
benevolence, and gentleness, with a quaint humor and readiness in
_repartée_ that enhanced the bond of comradeship between himself and
his children.
The people of his own State, as well as the inhabitants of the far-away
Sandwich Islands, are indebted to him for many benefactions. To the
latter his ships carried the first missionaries, the materials for
the first houses erected there, and the carpenters to build them.
Upon being charged duty on some salmon which he had imported from
the Columbia River, he pointed out to Louis Cass the desirability of
establishing the claim of the United States to the region of Oregon.
In the improvements which added so much to the prosperity of Boston in
1826 he was Mayor Quincy's constant adviser and abettor.
He was a handsome man, with firm mouth and kindling eyes, and his quick
step was well known in the business world, where to many a young
man he gave the opportunity which was the opening of a successful
mercantile career.
He was a son of Lieutenant Isaac Marshall of the Revolutionary
army, and a great-grandson of John Marshall, one of the founders of
Billerica, Massachusetts, in which town he was born. In the year 1800
he married Priscilla Waterman, a daughter of Freeman Waterman, who
represented the town of Halifax in the Cambridge Convention which
ratified for Massachusetts the Constitution of the United States.
Waterman had a sister who was distinguished for her charm, and who
married a Mr. Josselyn. Traditions of the Josselyn beauty lingered in
Plymouth until Emily Marshall's time. Mrs. Marshall was a woman of much
beauty, grace, and dignity.
Emily was born in the year 1807 on an estate at Cambridge, which had
been laid out a century before by Thomas Brattle. Shortly after her
birth her parents moved into a house in Brattle Square, Boston, known
as the White House. It was built upon a terrace, with steps running
down to the square. A large, old-fashioned garden in the rear was
one of its attractions. The house had already had two distinguished
tenants, Lieutenant-Governor Bolin and John Adams, the latter having
lived there when he was a young lawyer.
When Emily was fourteen years old her family once more transplanted
their household gods, going this time into the house on Franklin
Place, to which her beauty brought such fame. It had already begun to
manifest itself, and when she was but nine or ten years of age she was
frequently stopped on the street by strangers, who asked whose child
she was and involuntarily told her of her budding loveliness. Yet so
unconscious did she ever appear of its possession, so wholly lacking
in personal vanity, that one of her sisters, gazing upon her one night
arrayed in a ball-gown, and unable to restrain her admiration, asked
her if she realized how beautiful she was. "Yes," she replied, "I know
that I am beautiful, but I do not understand why people act so unwisely
about it."
Her education was begun at Madame English's school, where Russell
Sturgis, afterwards a partner of the Barings, said he first made her
acquaintance. Like every one else who ever saw her, he never forgot
her. More than forty years after her death, writing to thank her
daughter for the photograph of a portrait she had sent him, he said, "I
remember perfectly the portrait and the time when it was painted. No
painter could ever give the brilliant expression which always lighted
her beautiful face; the portrait is as good, therefore, as any one
could make it."
At Dr. Park's school on Mount Vernon Street, then one of the best
girls' schools in Boston, Margaret Fuller was one of her school-mates,
and confessed later to a sister of Emily's that she would willingly
have changed her mental gifts for those of the beauty and magnetism
with which Emily was endowed.
From Dr. Park's Emily went to Madame Canda's French school on Chestnut
Street. Her musical education, which continued till the time of her
marriage, was conducted by Mr. Matthew, Mademoiselle Berthien, and Mr.
Ostinelli.
The long acquaintance existing for generations among the families and
individuals who made up the Boston society of Emily Marshall's day,
had instilled into it a spirit of delightful simplicity. A traveller
from Great Britain who visited the United States early in the century
declared that all the people of the Bay State called one another by
their Christian names.
Dinner-parties were daylight affairs, beginning usually not later than
four o'clock. The dinner was served in courses, beginning with soup,
which was followed frequently by a corn-meal pudding designed for the
avowed purpose of mitigating the appetite before the introduction of
the roast, which was carved upon the table by the host, and served with
Madeira, port, or sherry.
One of Harrison Gray Otis's favorite after-dinner stories, which he
told in his own matchless way, was of the first appearance of champagne
in Boston. It was introduced by the French consul, the unsophisticated
Bostonians partaking of the palatable beverage with all the confidence
which they were wont to bestow upon cider, of which they thought it to
be only a mild form and of foreign extraction.
From eight until twelve were the hours for balls, at which girls
out for the first time wore white book-muslin frocks, the belles of
a season or more appearing in tarleton, and dancing out a pair of
slippers in an evening, slippers then being made with paper soles and
no heels. Light refreshments, such as nuts, raisins, or oysters, were
served at these evening affairs, and were passed on trays, there being
no elaborately set supper-tables.
The five-o'clock tea, now so prevalent throughout the country, made its
way first into Boston and New York, where it appeared in all its native
English simplicity.
From England also came actors bringing us our first conception of
Shakespearean characters, Cooper interpreting Hamlet to a Boston
audience in 1807, the year Emily Marshall was born, followed by
Wallack, Edmund Kean, Charles Matthews, the comedian, and Phillips,
with his infectious songs, the echoes of such refrains as "Though love
is warm awhile" floating long after from drawing-room, nursery, and
kitchen.
From the mother-country came our literature of the early century,
Scott, the new writer, being much read, also Fanny Burney, Jane Austen,
Maria Edgeworth, and Shakespeare always.
Boston early achieved her reputation as a patroness of letters. At her
noted seat of learning not only the youth of America, but a number of
foreigners were even then educated. Many an American boy who claimed
Harvard as his Alma Mater had journeyed to her sacred precincts, when
the country was in its teens, all the way from the wilds of Kentucky on
horseback.
Commencement day was a State holiday, when the flower of Massachusetts
womanhood united to do honor to the occasion. Many a man went thence
on his way with a face enshrined in his memory that he had not found
in his Virgil or his Homer, though nothing more perfect graced those
classic pages than the face of Emily Marshall.
Though Willis's sonnet speaks of her eyes as hazel, they have been
described elsewhere as black. It is probable that their color varied
and intensified with every thought or emotion. Her hair was of that
golden brown that flashes like bronze in the sunlight. In height she
was five feet and five inches. "Her personal grace," said one of her
admirers, a judge of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, "was not
acquired; a creature of such absolute natural perfection was physically
unable to make an ungraceful movement."
One who knew her in daily life writes: "The unspeakable grace, the
light of the eye, the expression of the face, they come back to me as I
think of her, but I cannot convey them to others. It was the light in a
porcelain vase. You could draw the outlines of the vase, but when the
light was quenched it could be known no more."
Enshrined in this form of almost unearthly loveliness was a spirit of
even rarer beauty, a character that would have made even an ugly woman
a force. In every relationship she wielded an exquisite influence. With
a nature profoundly and silently religious were combined a high sense
of duty, a ready sympathy, an absolute frankness and simplicity, a
clear, practical judgment, and a rapid insight into character.
In conversation she drew out the best thoughts of others intuitively
and without vanity, reserving her own brilliant intellect and ready wit
for those who really enjoyed it.
To her children, her self-abnegation, her gentleness, her faultless
judgment, the intense womanliness of her nature, made her an ideal
mother. She was as tenderly loved by women as she was chivalrously
worshipped by man. Her twenty-nine years of life were all too short for
those who prized and lost her.
"Say that no envious thought could have been possible in her presence,"
is another woman's tribute to her; "that her sunny ways were
fascinating to all alike; that she was as kind and attentive to the
stupid and tedious as if they were talented and of social prominence."
Of the effect everywhere produced by so exquisite a personality there
are countless evidences. It was not restricted to any age, sex, or
social class. Mr. William Amory claims to have been in his youth the
most distinguished man in Boston, because he was not in love with Emily
Marshall.
A carpenter, whose shop was near the house in which she lived after her
marriage, failed to go home to his dinner one day, and being asked the
reason, replied that he had seen Mrs. Otis go out earlier in the day
and he hoped that she might come back that way, adding that he would
rather see her any day than eat his dinner.
Franklin Place became the favorite walk with the young men of Boston,
many of whom never failed once or twice daily to pass her house, with
the hope of catching a glimpse of her at one of its windows. Dr.
Malcolm's church, of which she was a member, also added many devotees
to its congregation, William Lloyd Garrison being among the number, who
confessed that he occasionally went there with the hope of seeing the
lovely face of Emily Marshall.
Nor was the repute of her beauty confined to her native city. Wherever
she went her unusual presence was instantly felt; she needed no society
correspondent to herald her, no princely admirer to create prestige for
her. Her claim to the world's homage was self-evident. She was a queen
in her own right.
When she visited Philadelphia, so great was the desire to see her that
the young girls were let out of school before the usual closing hour,
that they might have an opportunity to see her as she passed along the
street.
While she was at Saratoga, "gay, amusing, and confusing," reached
in those days from Boston by a tedious stage-coach ride across the
country, she never left the hotel nor returned to it without attracting
a throng of people, eager even for a passing glimpse of her.
Nathaniel Parker Willis, who once had made a journey in the same
coach in which Emily Marshall and her mother were travelling, related
afterwards that wherever the coach stopped for dinner the news of the
marvellous beauty of one of the passengers was spread abroad so rapidly
that by the time Miss Marshall returned to her seat in the coach a
great crowd of people would be assembled to see her.
The following is Willis's very pretty acrostic on Emily Marshall, which
is included in his published verses in the form of a sonnet:
"Elegance floats about thee like a dress,
Melting the airy motion of thy form
Into one swaying grace, and loveliness,
Like a rich tint that makes a picture warm,
Is lurking in the chestnut of thy tress,
Enriching it as moonlight after storm
Mingles dark shadows into gentleness.
A beauty that bewilders like a spell
Reigns in thine eyes' dear hazel, and thy brow,
So pure in veined transparency, doth tell
How spiritually beautiful art thou,--
A temple where angelic love might dwell,
Life in thy presence were a thing to keep,
Like a gay dreamer clinging to his sleep."
Percival's sonnet, published in the _Literary Gazette_ of Philadelphia,
August, 1825, is perhaps the best known of the poetical outpourings
which her loveliness inspired. It also is an acrostic.
"Earth holds no fairer, lovelier than thou,
Maid of the laughing lip and frolic eye;
Innocence sits upon thy open brow
Like a pure spirit in its native sky.
If ever beauty stole the heart away,
Enchantress, it would fly to meet thy smile;
Moments would seem by thee a summer's day
And all around thee an Elysian isle.
Roses are nothing to thy maiden blush
Sent o'er thy cheek's soft ivory; and night
Has naught so dazzling in its world of light
As the dark rays that from thy lashes gush.
Love lurks among thy silken curls and lies,
Like a keen archer, in thy kindling eyes."
William Foster Otis, to whom she was married in May, 1831, first saw
her when she was fourteen years old, on her way home from school. He
loved her from the moment his eyes fell upon her, and honored her with
the loyalty of a lifetime, though death robbed him of her five years
after their marriage.
Of the wedding there is extant a very good description in the form of a
letter written by the bridegroom's sister, under date of May 20, 1831.
"There were fifty guests at the wedding, an enormous crowd at the
visit [reception] which kept us until half-past ten from supper.
The bride looked very lovely, and was modest and unaffected. Her
dress was a white crêpe lisse, with a rich vine of silver embroidery
at the top of the deep hem. The neck and sleeves were trimmed with
three rows of elegant blond lace very wide. Gloves embroidered with
silver, stockings ditto. Her dark-brown hair dressed plain in front,
high bows with a few orange-blossoms and a rich blond lace scarf,
tastefully arranged on her head, one end hanging front over her left
shoulder, the other hanging behind over her right. No ornaments of
any kind, either on her neck or ears, not even a buckle. I never saw
her look so beautiful. Every one was remarking on her beauty as they
passed in and out of the room. Mrs. Marshall [the bride's mother]
looked extremely handsome. William [the bridegroom] looked quite as
handsome as the bride, and seemed highly delighted. The bride and
groom went to their house alone [70 Beacon Street] about one o'clock
[in the morning]. The groomsmen serenaded them until the birds sang
as loud as their instruments."
James Freeman Clarke, who was present at her wedding, said afterwards
that he "had often been perplexed at the accounts he had read of
the great personal power of Mary Queen of Scots. He had never been
able to comprehend how the mere beauty of a woman could so control
the destinies of individuals and nations, causing men gladly to
accept death as the price of a glance of the eyes or a touch of the
hand." After he had beheld Emily Marshall, however, he realized the
possibilities of such a power that is not created once in a century.
She died in 1826, leaving two daughters and an infant son.
"She had no autumn, not a storm
Darkened her youthful happiness;
No winter came to bend that form,
Or silver o'er a silken tress.
"We miss her when we gaze on beauty's throng,
We miss her, aye, and we shall mourn her long.
Yet mourn her not, she had the best of life;
A tender mother and a happy wife."
The above lines were written by her friend Fanny Inglis, afterwards
Madame Calderon de la Barca.
The chivalrous devotion which her daughters call forth, after more than
threescore years, from the men who knew her is in itself sufficient to
place her among the classics of American womanhood.
OCTAVIA WALTON
(MADAME LE VERT)
Into a world in which so many are born strangers, some later to know it
in part and others destined to remain forever out of touch with life,
and lonely spectators rather than a part of it, Octavia Walton came as
unto her own. Every atom of her being was in absolute accord with the
universe. No bristling antipathies hedged in her genial personality nor
raised barriers between herself and the beauties of life. She perceived
them always and with an enthusiasm that raised not only her own
existence, but that of many others, above the level of the commonplace.
She was a sort of social sun, radiating light, warmth, and beauty upon
all the lives that touched hers, and it has been said that no one
ever came in contact with her, of no matter what rank or condition in
life, without experiencing a sense of elation. She was one of nature's
cosmopolites, a woman to whom the whole world was home and the people
of all nations her friends. Far more to this gift of temperament than
to those of her personal beauty or intellect, does she owe the eminence
of her position among the American women of her century.
She was born early enough in the history of the Republic to partake
in a measure of the glow of patriotic enthusiasm that had been the
inspiration of its founders. Though she was intensely American, she
grew up with no touch of bitterness for the mother-country, cherishing
the memory of Chatham's words uttered in the House of Lords, "You
cannot conquer America," rather than his sovereign's misguided efforts
"to be a king."
Her grandfather, George Walton, who died two years before her birth,
was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. He was a
native of Prince Edward County, Virginia, but removed, prior to the
Revolution, to Georgia, whence he was sent as a delegate to the first
Congress. He had married, in the State of his adoption, Miss Camber,
the daughter of an English nobleman and the heiress to large tracts
of land that were grants from the crown. To this grandmother Octavia
Walton was indebted for many graphic stories of the thrilling days
through which her country had passed in establishing itself as an
independent nation. She was in Philadelphia with her husband, who was
in attendance upon the Congress there, when the news of the fall of
Yorktown was received. The town was quietly sleeping when the watchman
calling the hours announced, as usual, "Past midnight, and all's well!"
then, after an instant's pause and in a voice that resounded through
the streets, "And Cornwallis is taken!" It sent a thrill through the
town, and turned that October night into day, for presently the streets
were swarming with people wild with joyous excitement.
When Madame Le Vert related to Lamartine, with whom she passed
an evening during one of her visits to Paris, in speaking of the
Declaration of Independence, that her grandfather's name was thereon
inscribed, and that he had given his blood and his fortune to the cause
of America's freedom, the Frenchman arose and bowed to her profoundly.
"Madame," he said, "in his name you have a noble heritage. It is the
true patent of nobility, and you rightly cherish your descent from such
a brave and heroic patriot with honest pride."
The State of Georgia gave George Walton high honors, making him
governor and, later, judge of the Supreme Court, and erecting a
monument to commemorate his sterling qualities in one of the principal
thoroughfares of the city of Augusta. His son and namesake married
the accomplished and beautiful Miss Sally Walker, the daughter of
a distinguished jurist of Georgia. Of the two children of their
marriage,--a son and a daughter,--the latter was born at Bellevue, near
Augusta, in the year 1810. She was named by her mother after the Roman
Octavia, the beloved and noble sister of Augustus and the deserted wife
of Marc Anthony, and was taught to revere the beauty of a character
that possessed, as Pope Pius IX. said, when Madame Le Vert told him for
whom she was named, "every virtue and grace that should adorn a woman."
[Illustration: OCTAVIA WALTON
(MADAME LE VERT)]